How I was persuaded that Currys is really hot stuff

Dixons to me was always a glitzy, hi-tech place with lots of good ideas for presents for the kids (or occasionally for Dad), even if the veneer of dotcomology was as threadbare as the warrant-pushing 'expertise' of the assistants. Currys, on the other hand, was where my mum got her toaster or hair-curlers, and where you might go to do a bit of tyre-kicking on the latest washing machine before ordering it from Comet for home delivery.

So last week's changes, wrought by John Clare of parent group DSG International after much consultation with focus groups and brand consultants, were a bit of a shock. The faux glamour of the big red Dixons sign is to disappear forever from the high street, to be replaced by the apparently oxymoronic Currys.digital. My first reaction was that Clare had simply got it the wrong way round. Shouldn't Dixons have been given the new-age treatment and Currys left to wither away as a brand, like Timothy Whites or the Midland bank?

But having chatted it through with Clare, I'm prepared to accept that there is a persuasive commercial and financial logic to the move, regardless of the first impression that he had got the names mixed up. (He is a very persuasive chap, by the way - I ended our conversation agreeing to buy him lunch in the near future, which he regarded as an act of unprecedented generosity on the part of a journalist.)

If you look at it like this, it suddenly doesn't seem so strange: there are three times more Currys shops in Britain than Dixons, and it is the biggest brand in electricals in the country. If you walk into a Currys to order a washing machine, you might walk out with a iPod as well, but not vice versa. It is easier to convert Dixons stores to take white goods than the other way round. The whole exercise - rebranding, renaming, refurbing - will only cost £7m anyway, which will be covered by two years' operating benefits.

Meanwhile, Dixons will become a fully-fledged dotcom entity, offering a bigger range of higher-tech goods at lower prices over the internet for home delivery - a kind of Amazon specialising in electronics. (Except in airport departure lounges, incidentally, where it will remain roughly as it is now - few people stop to buy that last-minute washing machine before boarding the Easyjet to Malaga.)

This makes eminent commercial sense. Home-delivered internet shopping is the way of the future, and Dixons.com will be a 'pure play' in this explosively growing market. (The other huge growth industry, of course, is the home delivery groups, but that is a rather different story.)

DSG, meanwhile, has a couple of other options in the sector, which it is exploring diligently. The PC Collect@store operation - where you order over the internet and then pick up from the store if, on closer inspection, you still like the kit - has been very successful as one of the 'multi-channel' alternatives. The Link, after a poor Christmas, is still looking for the killer product (like Carphone Warehouse's pink Razr) and the only way is up. If not, it will be sold or closed.

I'll be in a position to give an update, I hope, after our lunch.

We can't Wimbledonise the entire country

BAE Systems has done the right thing by selling out of Airbus, and its management should be congratulated on a shrewdly timed piece of financial chip-cashing. However, I fear that the sale will ultimately cost the jobs of the 13,000 workers involved, as well as many suppliers. But then that is the perverse logic of 'Wimbledonisation'.

New readers start here: the theory of Wimbledonisation - as espoused by every cash-hungry British investor who sees a few dollars, euros or yen on offer - is that foreign ownership of corporate assets does not matter. Even if all the players come from overseas (like the tennis tournament) what really counts is that it is played here. That is why great British names such as Rolls-Royce, Morgan Grenfell, P&O and Cazenove are owned by foreigners, and why others, such as BAA and the London Stock Exchange, may follow.

My contention has always been that it does matter. Maybe less so in the soaring markets we've seen recently - when times are good, the overseas owners are quite happy to let London get on with earning the money. But when times get harder - and as sure as eggs is eggs they will - the overseas arms of foreign businesses (that is, British businesses - keep up, please) will be the first to bear the brunt of retrenchment, job cuts and divestment.

This happens on an annual basis in the City, by the way, where the vast majority of financial institutions are foreign-owned. Those banks that have had a bad year let whole armies of people go, except that you do not notice: in the fluid jobs market in the Square Mile, they are re-hired seamlessly by other (foreign-owned) banks.

But what works nicely in the City will not work so smoothly in Broughton. To have an aeroplane, even one as successful as Airbus, built in three different countries was always an absurdity, a manoeuvre cobbled together to satisfy the Euro-dirigisme of the French and Germans who actually control and believe in Airbus. Now we will be able to see exactly how much of an artifice it was.

Within a couple of years, the business leaders of Toulouse or Stuttgart will begin to question why they are sending to North Wales to assemble wings for their planes (which may by then have lost ground to a resurgent Boeing) and will place the next order somewhere more convenient and more competitive - on the Continent.

Then all the promises of trade ministers and union leaders, being made now in the heat of alleged 'betrayal' by BAE, will count for nothing. These are hollow promises indeed, which will fall foul of virtually every EU sanction on illegal state aid. Those making them should know better.